I wouldn't SLI if I were you. I had the same idea back when I bought my 760, I thought, "oh ill get another down the road" and I did, and I hated it. While it was "fast" there were frame stutter issues, tons of games I had to disable it, etc.

This time around I bought a 980ti and I couldn't be happier.

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

ASUS and MSI gpus will most likely allow these clocks for their consumer brands. Specially binning review samples is common in hardware in general. Most hardware companies test each component to make sure they don't fail and make sure the packaging is perfect before sending them in for review.

Fallout 4, 970 OC vs 1070 ~30% difference. 1070 has ~5-7% OC headroom so around 5% more performance if you OC it and 970 can reach 1600 MHZ so another 5%.

The inconsistency of those FPSs on both cards is worrysome, specially with the 970. My monitor is only 1080p so it would run smoother than that video, but unless FO4 is badly optimized then i dont see myself upgrading to a 1440p display with any of those 2 cards.

so if review claims that "1070 is 55% faster than 970" add 20% on 970 and that ends up as 35%same for 980ti, if review claims "1080 is 30% faster than 980ti" add 15% performance to 980ti and that ends up as 15%

^ Might just work. On another note, I've seen the 980/ti drop its price significantly in the past few days. Now's probably a good time to grab one for those looking to SLI their 980ti.

If you want SLI, buying a second card after you get the first is almost never a good idea. Get them both at the same time or not at all. SLI and CrossFire have a heavy reliance on customizations for particular games, and those customizations stop for one architecture when the next releases. Which means right about now, unless Pascal is close enough to Maxwell that optimizations for Pascal are automatically optimizations for Maxwell for free. Which is plausible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

^ Might just work. On another note, I've seen the 980/ti drop its price significantly in the past few days. Now's probably a good time to grab one for those looking to SLI their 980ti.

If you want SLI, buying a second card after you get the first is almost never a good idea. Get them both at the same time or not at all. SLI and CrossFire have a heavy reliance on customizations for particular games, and those customizations stop for one architecture when the next releases. Which means right about now, unless Pascal is close enough to Maxwell that optimizations for Pascal are automatically optimizations for Maxwell for free. Which is plausible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Cool. Will keep that in mind. I haven't tried SLI since my old 680s and even then optimization wasn't all too good. I just thought things might've improved by now.

The games that are optimized are better optimized (closer to actually getting 2x the benefit from 2x the GPUs), but it seems that fewer games are getting optimized. That may just be that a larger percentage of games today are things like Indie titles, which don't have much of a prayer of getting hand-optimization from a driver engineer, or it may be that there are fewer AAA - level titles that are just bothering to even fool with it and think that whatever optimization they get baked in from using the off-the-shelf engine they choose is enough.

^ Might just work. On another note, I've seen the 980/ti drop its price significantly in the past few days. Now's probably a good time to grab one for those looking to SLI their 980ti.

thats correct, 980ti has dropped price to 400-450$, for someone who wants to spend that much on GPU theres not that much point waiting for 1070 (but so far that was just on Newegg, there was EVGA Kingpin for 400$ and MSI Golden edition for 399$).

And as far as SLI goes that is still the only way to get that much performance, 1080 is some 10-15% faster than 980ti. Other option is waiting for 1080ti/Titan but those are still far away and judging by increasing prices trend for NVidia, prices might be....not pretty for those.

The current new cards AMD is putting out are not any better than their past cards. They are more efficient and the like, but so far look to be rehashes of the last line with some minimal improvements. You won't see cards to compete with the 1070/1080 just yet from AMD and this has been stated multiple times multiple places...